Author Lesley Poling-Kempes brings to life two adventurous and very different groups of lesser-known women whose legacies shaped the American Southwest in significant ways. She weaves together their unique experiences in a presentation that draws on oral histories, period photographs, journal excerpts, and her first-hand research.

Poling-Kempes, author of The Harvey Girls: Women Who Opened the West, tells the story of the 100,000 young women who left their homes from across the country to work as waitresses in the chain of Harvey House restaurants along the Santa Fe Railway from the 1880s to the 1950s. She offers a vivid portrait of these ordinary women who became pioneers in the burgeoning railroad towns of the Southwest, changing history in a region where at one time there were “no ladies west of Dodge City and no women west of Albuquerque.”

In Ladies of the Canyons: A League of Extraordinary Women and Their Adventures in the American Southwest Poling-Kempes chronicled the lives of Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright—educated and inquisitive women who each in the early decades of the 20th century left the security and comfort of genteel society and journeyed to the Southwest. They imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who each would follow them. Poling-Kempes reveals how their lives were transformed by the people, landscapes, and cultures they found—particularly Native American art and music. Their legacies include the Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O'Keeffe made a home for 50 years, now an educational and retreat center; the San Diego Museum of Art; and Santa Fe’s Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.

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